Occasionally you may want an image of an application icon in Mac OS X (perhaps you are writing a tutorial, and wish to include an image like the one to the right). Within each Mac OS X application is a package that contains an “.icns” file, which is the icon image used by the application.

Using the Finder

You may access this file through the Finder, using the following steps:

In the Applications folder, choose the application whose icon you wish to extract.

Ctrl-click (right-click) on the application icon and choose Show Package Contents.

A new Finder window will open. Browse to the Resources folder and look for the icon. This file usually has an “icns” extension.

Open Preview, and drag the “.icns” file to the Preview icon in the Dock. The image will open in Preview and from there you may save it as a “.png” or “.jpg” file. The former is the preferable format for the web; select the “Alpha” check box to preserve transparency.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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